Innovation Campuses for Market Research

A cluster formed by merger

The Exchange's life sciences estate comprises around 1.6 million square feet, formed by merging two separate campus investments into a single advanced research cluster.

The larger campus operates as a joint venture with a national government, supports the research institutions of a major university, and hosts national scientific infrastructure — including a national facilities council, a national quantum computing centre and a national space agency.

Why an exchange holds research space

The Exchange's entire function depends on measurement. Assay methods, reference standards, environmental testing and the metrology behind them all originate in facilities like these, and the credibility of a corridor's compliance claims is downstream of their quality.

Holding research campuses in custody is therefore not a diversification. It puts the Exchange alongside the institutions that generate the analytical capability its own register relies on, and gives member research organisations a landlord whose obligations are held to exchange standards.

Serving occupiers with unusual requirements

Research occupiers need what ordinary commercial space cannot provide: power and cooling resilience, vibration and contamination control, specialist waste handling, and security appropriate to national infrastructure.

Each of those obligations sits in the custody record for the relevant building, maintained continuously rather than certified at handover. An institution taking space can verify the position of the facility before committing, and a member underwriting the campus can see what actually supports its rental income — a tenant base of national institutions and long-horizon research programmes.

Anchors and the pipeline behind them

A research cluster's value is set by its anchors. National scientific infrastructure, a research council, a quantum computing centre and a space agency generate demand from the suppliers, spinouts and instrument makers that need to be near them.

That secondary demand is where the campus economics actually sit, and it is highly sensitive to whether the anchors expand or contract. The Exchange records anchor commitments and their terms alongside the wider tenancy schedule so members can see the dependency clearly.

The joint venture with government that underpins the larger campus is recorded on the same basis. Public partnership is what makes assets of this kind possible; holding its terms in custody is what makes them transferable.